


Finding Home

by Mary_Ellen_G



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: F/F, Mental Illness, Not Graphic But Maybe Triggering So Proceed With Caution, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 01:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2370029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mary_Ellen_G/pseuds/Mary_Ellen_G
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She's been alive for fourteen years and she can't see the future any more. Jackson city is right in front of them but she can't see past it. She can't see a future for herself when the past is dragging her down under the waves."</p><p>Ellie has trouble adjusting to life after the events of the Last of Us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Home

 

Ellie has grown up in a world full of evil. She's grown up looking for monsters under her bed, not because she's scared but because they really do exist and it's necessary. She doesn't have nightmares of the boogyman, she has nightmares of a run down mall, a dead girl, and _clicking_. She's grown up in a world so full of evil she's taught herself to desensitize things. She knows how to justify things, so she can get past them (if only for a little while).

David is only a slight exception in that she cries. She cries for a long time after he's dead (she killed him, she killed him, she watched him die) but then she shoves it away. She thinks it bothers Joel, honestly, how she suddenly doesn't want to talk about it. She understands, now, where he was coming from.

It's so much  _easier_ to just not talk about it (don't think about it, don't imagine it, don't relive it). So she shoves it away and focuses all of her attention on Salt Lake City. She imagines the Fireflies with arms wide open. She imagines them happy to see her; ready to work with her to find a cure.

Then they get to the city and she remembers jumping onto a bus to save Joel, then waking up in the back of a truck headed out of the city. He tells her they're on their way back to Jackson City, and she can accept that. She liked Tommy when she met him.

But suddenly she has so much baggage. She doesn't just dream of clicks and monsters and dead loved ones, she dreams of hands clawing at her naked body (she's so young, too young for this) and the white blur of sharp needles and morphine held by doctors who don't want to work with  _her_ so much as work with parts of her.

It stings in her bones and she doesn't know how she can ever be normal. She wonders how Joel lives, how he can carry on with one foot in front of the other and still haul his baggage and the weight of the world with a torn abdomen and calloused hands. She's so young. She's been alive for fourteen years and she can't see the future any more. Jackson city is right in front of them but she can't see past it. She can't see a future for herself when the past is dragging her down under the waves (she doesn't know how to swim; she's so scared of the deep black under the shiny waves and the unknown they hold).

Joel tries to talk to her, when they get settled in a little cabin next to Tommy's, behind the barbed-wire fence and the lines of men with guns and horses who spend every day keeping out the monsters that once sunk their teeth into her (and her first love, and Tess, and so many others).

Talking doesn't work. It only brings about the wash of memories of David and Salt Lake City and it leaves her gasping for breath and dry heaving into the toilet of the house that she is so fucking grateful for (but she can't enjoy it, because every time she eats at that table she sees an arm dropping off a butcher block and she wonders how she would have tasted).

Joel holds her when she cries her eyes dry, and it's different from David's hands so she sinks into them. She clings to him and begs him to stay with her, to make her forget the way that David looked at her.

 

Joel is scared. He's scared for Ellie, and the way that she stares off into the distance like she's a soldier back from a war with no place to call home. He decides to talk to Tommy and Maria about it when he startles Ellie from behind by accident and she reacts, reaching for her knife and turning on him with eyes like a wild animal (her knees buckle too, and she sits in the corner for an hour, staring at the windows like David is going to come in at any minute. Joel holds her on the hard floor and tries not to panic).

Maria throws out words like  _trauma_ and  _triggers_ and then Tommy pipes in with  _Post Traumatic Stress Disorder_ and Joel has heard a lot of words in his life but those shake his bones, filling him with a helplessness he hasn't felt in a long, long time. 

He gets mad, of course, because he doesn't know what else to do. He's so angry that he takes a horse, and hunts for hours and hours and thinks about how it would feel to bash David's face in with his bare hands so that he can prove to Ellie that he is dead and gone and he's worthless. He shoots squirrels with arrows and doesn't mind the sting in his fingers from pulling the string back time and time again.

When he gets back, wiping the blood of his finger tips on his dirty jeans, Maria introduces him to a man a bit older than he is, with gray hair and blue eyes. She says he can help; he's a doctor. He was trained to heal both the body and the mind, at a college before the infection spread. Joel doesn't trust him but the promise of help is enough to make him let the man in his house (it's their house, really, but the doctor looks at him funny when he shrugs and says that it's Ellie's too, even if she's not an adult, because they are a two-man-package).

 

Doctor P. is not nice, and that's why Ellie trusts him. He carries a gun around, leading with his eyes around corners before he commits to make sure there's nothing there; it's a gesture so small it would go unnoticed to anyone else but the familiarity of it makes her give the man a chance when he tells her she's sick and he can help. She bristles a little at the mention of the word  _sick_ because sick means weak and even if she is a little haunted she will never be weak (she falls back on her pride in times like this because it's so hard to confront the memory. She likes to think Joel taught her that.)

She doesn't want to talk about it, because when he asks about David she seizes up like before, scrambling off the couch and moving to sit in the corner away from everyone in the room because the memories are overloading her and she unconsciously feels like reliving those things by the people she loves will break down her love for them and she'll finally be all alone (she can't ever associate cannibals and rapists with Joel because he's the only thing she hasn't lost and if she thinks of David when she thinks of Joel's name, he won't be hers anymore).

Joel moves toward her and she flinches, and she tries not to see the hurt look on his face. The doctor informs him quietly that she needs time, because she's so hurt and she hasn't had time to process exactly what happened to her. She wants to thank him for putting her feelings into words but when she opens her mouth she lets out an embarrassing whine and she honestly thinks she's killing Joel by the look on his face. Maria pats him on the shoulder and then the doctor is talking to her again.

He eases her into it, slowly, over a few days and then the days turn into weeks (and she can finally look Joel in the eyes again for chrissake). She's getting better, and she starts to get proud of herself for being able to feel again like she used to get proud of a headshot or a good hunt. Joel smiles at her a lot and she goes riding with Maria again and then there are people in the town she hadn't ever met before. She wonders why, and when she remembers the state she was in when she arrived in the town her chest starts to sting with regret but she talks about it and sets it free and now she's trying her hardest to be social because people can be awesome sometimes (and none of them are creepy, none of them want to hurt her, none of them want anything from her she isn't willing to give).

She starts to make friends with people in the village (but never her age because she feels far to old to relate to other fourteen-year-olds). She joins a group of young women Maria introduces her to, who are in charge of taking care of the horses. It's _fun_ if Ellie lets herself think the word, and she thinks it's as close to a girly clique as she's ever going to get.

She still sticks to Joel like glue, though, because he's safe. When Doctor P. asks her about Joel, she doesn't know what to say. He's really the only constant in her life, and she has trouble explaining that to the doctor.

“How would you describe your relationship with Joel?” he asks, kicking his feet up on the table even though Joel has told him not to.

“Huh?” Ellie asks, confused. Sometimes Doctor P. forgets that she's only fourteen and still largely innocent to the world.

“Is he like a dad to you?”

Ellie snorts. “Not really. If he were my dad he'd make me go to school and stuff. Why?”

“You two are dangerously codependent,” he says bluntly, and Ellie makes a noise of indignation. She may not know most of the words he says but she's heard that term before and she doesn't like it.

“We are not!”

The doctor rolls his eyes. “Hear me out, little one.” She scoffs at that. “You two refuse to go anywhere without each other. You get edgy and nervous when he's not beside you,” he says, gesturing to her jittery knees and wringing hands. “He's far more easily provoked when you're not around.”

Ellie sees his point but she doesn't understand what's so bad about wanting to stick with Joel. They've been through so much together (like cannibals, like infected, like people who want her for her fungus tainted brain) that it seems like she'll only be safe with Joel. When she tells him that he says that's the problem. She still doesn't see it.

“Being with Joel all the time isn't a problem. The problem is the panic you feel when you're not around him. David isn't coming back, Ellie. No one is going to hurt you here.”

Her hands are shaking and she wants Joel but she feels like it's wrong to want that now.

“I know that. I just... when he's not here I feel like I'm back in that stupid fucking village. I feel like I'm by myself again. I feel all panicked and shaky and I just want to see him, you know? To make sure that he's okay and I'm okay and we're not actually back with... _them_ , you know?”

It still feels weird to talk about her feelings like this but she's gotten better at it and Doctor P. doesn't seem to be upset with her (but it's wrong so _wrong_ the feelings swimming in her head and the flashes of R _ileyWinstonTessSamMarlene_ mix with death and spores) and she still has to blink a few extra times to clear herself of the thoughts when Joel arrives to walk her to the stables.

Ellie has had too much loss to be a normal girl. She shouldn't be haunted by so much, and she deserves more than to have seen so much death. But when Maria introduces Ellie to a taller, dark haired girl by the name of Rachel, Ellie senses something different. Tides have changed.

Her mind is still... messed up (twisted and gnarled and stained and ruined and punctured and stolen and _broken_ ) and Doctor P. still thinks she's too dependent on Joel, but the first time Rachel wraps a comforting arm around Ellie's shoulders as they're walking out of the stables, the air in the town swirls with the hope of healing.

Joel likes Rachel, which is weird because he tries his hardest not to. He knows that Ellie is still _sick_ and he thinks that another creature with flaws and feelings and _mortality_ for Ellie to get attached to might be a little hard for the girl to handle. Arrangements are made for bonding moments and healing time and soon, Ellie is sitting at the table with Joel and Doctor P. and Rachel and they're all _laughing_ (at what she can't remember but she knows it's good and whole and for once her bones don't ache with the tenderness of someone who is broken and bruised and stolen away from happiness).

Rachel's hands are warm in Ellie's no matter how cold the air is, and among the hugs from Joel and the good natured teasings from Tommy it occurs to Ellie that now she has a friend (and oh god she can't do this she can't be in love she can't be hurt like that again but-) Rachel's hands are still warm when they take Ellie's chin and aim her eyes into a pair of darker ones (holy shit look like hers they've seen so much what the-). Ellie can't focus on loss because Rachel is smiling and tells her, “It gets better. I know it's scary but it does. And I'm always here for you.”

And in her eyes Ellie sees the echoes of Joel and Tommy and Maria and the people on this earth who love her. It digs into her soul and twists and grips and settles like a rumbling mountain storm in her gut but  _ not at all in a bad way. _ The revelation shocks her so hard that when Rachel drops her hand and takes off at a sprint toward the stables yelling, “Race 'ya!” Ellia actually loses. 

There is hay and horses and grass and sweat and when Rachel and Ellie stumble into Joel and Ellie's cabin an hour after Ellie misses her appointment with Doctor P, their laughter and joy fills the room so much that Joel forgets to be mad and forgets his worry and he knows that he needs to tell Doctor P. not to expect Ellie at her next appointment, either.

He thinks idly that the thought should scare him, but it doesn't at all. He still likes Rachel, even though he still doesn't want to, and while he doesn't see Ellie as often now and it makes him cranky and tired he can't find room to dislike the girl. She makes Ellie happy and when Joel hears their laughter it punches him in the gut with big bricks of  _ FATHERHOOD _ and he has an errant thought of weddings and walking his  _ baby girl  _ down the aisle to meet a tall dark haired woman in white, and it makes his heart clench in the best possible way.

He doesn't tell Ellie this, because she still sometimes has tremors and terrors at night, and he knows she's so far away from being whole, but it's okay.

 

It's all okay because their minds are healing and their family is growing and becoming whole, and maybe even if the whole world is shot to hell it will all be okay because the little sanctuary in Wyoming is  _ safe _ and  _ home. _

 


End file.
